The 2015 State of DevOps Report is Here

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We are excited to share the findings from our fourth annual State of DevOps Report, in partnership with IT Revolution. In the past four years, we’ve surveyed over 20,000 technical professionals and learned a lot about IT and organizational performance. In that relatively short timespan, DevOps went from being an obscure buzzword to the biggest movement in IT today.

Today, every company is a technology company. Recent high-profile outages at WSJ, NYSE and United Airlines illustrate how core IT is to commerce. They also show us how costly failures can really be.

We know from prior years' research that high-performing IT organizations deploy faster and more frequently. Surprisingly, this year's high-performing group had much higher stability compared to last year’s high performers: They are able to recover 168 times faster from failures and they had 60 times fewer failures due to changes.

High-performing organizations are able to move fast, while significantly increasing their stability and reliability through the use of lean management and continuous delivery practices. Much like the lean manufacturing movement of the 1980s, what we’re seeing is that when you apply lean principles to software delivery, you get great results — higher quality, shorter cycle times, and lower costs. In traditional software development, quality is the responsibility of one team. Continuous delivery practices distribute the responsibility for quality to everyone involved in the delivery process, so you can build quality into the entire process, starting with the dev’s laptop.

This year we examined the critical role IT managers play in a DevOps transformation. To draw another parallel to lean manufacturing, in lean management, managers are first and foremost teachers and mentors, and they are experts in their domains. We found that the effectiveness of the team leader was strongly correlated with organizational culture, lean management and continuous delivery practices, and achieving win-win outcomes between dev, ops and infosec teams. Managers can do a lot to improve their team’s performance by creating a respectful work environment, ensuring work is not wasted, and most importantly, investing in developing the capabilities of their people.

These are just a few of the findings from this year’s report. We also cover other hot-button issues in technology, including diversity and burnout. We encourage you to dig in and let us know what you think. Download the 2015 State of DevOps Report today.